Frenzy Finally Gets a Good DVD Cover

Hitchcock's comeback of 1972, "Frenzy," had a pretty good poster back in its year of release, with the "necktie" motif swirling in concert with the words "HITCHCOCK'S" "FRENZY" and a couple of nice tag lines: "From the master of shock! A shocking masterpiece!" and "A new twist from the original Hitchcock." Cast member Anna Massey's screaming face and head centered the poster, along with a teeny-tiny drawing of Barry Foster as "the Necktie Strangler" (which rather gave the game away -- for the first 30 minutes of the movies, we're supposed to think that Jon Finch is the killer.)

Good enough.

But starting in the 80s with the VHS release of Frenzy, and continuing on into the 90s and 2000's, the "video" poster for Frenzy was pretty subpar IMHO, a combination of dull AND icky: Pretty much just a close-up of Anna Massey screaming...but not look very attractive at all(Massey wasn't a raving beauty but she didn't look THAT bad.)

"The Anna Massey screaming" Frenzy VHS and DVD posters really made Frenzy look pretty bad in the years of that release.

Efforts were eventually made to shift attention to another element of Frenzy: not the victim(and Massey's murder isn't thre really graphic one in Frenzy; Barbara Leigh Hunt's is), but the killer: Barry Foster as Bob Rusk.

After the black-and-white psycho villains of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt(Joseph Cotton as Uncle Charlie), Strangers on a Train(Robert Walker as Bruno Anthony) and Psycho(Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates) Frenzy was finally a Technicolor film and Bob Rusk was a "Technicolor psycho" with bright thatch of curled butterscotch-red-blond hair atop his head and his muttonshop side burns(it all screamed "1972 hair.")

Foster had been cast because of his resemblance to Michael Caine, who turned the role of Rusk down. But a first attempt to portay Foster on a Frenzy VHS cover made the rather handsome man look instead like...Marty Feldman? (Ugly, bug-eyes.)

Over time, a somewhat better but still rather ugly close-up of Barry Foster landed on a DVD cover but then...

...some years later, the BEST DVD cover to date was put together. No Anna Massey screaming. Rather the TWO leads -- an intense looking Jon Finch, a menacing looking Barry Foster -- were in side by side close-ups with a small drawing of a woman in a bedroom being menaced in between(that artwork was in a 1972 paperback version of Frenzy.) Both Finch and Foster looked handsome -- and we were reminded that, for total unknowns(at the movies) both men had "movie star looks." They COULD have both been stars under some circumstance, but it was not to be(probably Foster looking too much like Caine, you can only have one.)

Well, now in 2022, I've seen yet another new DVD cover for Frenzy, and it is in many ways the best yet:

Barry Foster and Jon Finch still get the cover together -- but Finch's photo is much smaller and in the corner of the frame. Rather, Barry Foster's Bob Rusk is front and center, dominating the cover, well-dressed, suave and menacing -- truly (the years have proven) the true LEAD of Frenzy, just like Perkins was in Psycho and Walker was in Strangers on a Train. (Joseph Cotton in Shadow of a Doubt, however, didn't get to dominate Teresa Wright's star power.) Jon Finch , alas and fittingly, must join Farley Granger and John Gavin in taking "second seat" to a Hitchcock psycho.

Along with the emphasis on a handsome, menacing Bob Rusk, the new Frenzy cover spotlights something important: a necktie and Rusk's "R" tiepin (so well used in so many ways throughout the film.) The psycho villain, his weapon of choice, his MacGuffin(the tiepin)...all dominating the poster and eradicating memories of an unattractive version of Anna Massey screaming.

Somebody got it right.

Not to mention: the BIGGEST name on the DVD? Alfred Hitchocck, of course. Still crazy(and important) after all these years.